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Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality

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Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality Lawrence M. Eppard, Mark Robert Rank, and Heather E. Bullock with Noam Chomsky, Henry A. Giroux, David Brady, and Dan Schubert LEHIGH UNIVERSITY PRESS Bethlehem 19_1205_Eppard.indb 3 2/5/20 2:59 PM Contents 1 The Problem with American Individualism 1 PART I: SOCIAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVES 51 2 The American Inequality Palette 53 3 Social Psychological Functions of Inequality Beliefs 101 4 In Conversation 121 PART II: INDIVIDUALISM ON THE GROUND 159 5 Cleaning the Ivory Tower 161 6 Paved with Good Intentions 201 PART III: THE BIG PICTURE 227 7 Inequality Beliefs and Social Justice 229 Afterword 261 References 269 Index 291 About the Authors 295 v 19_1205_Eppard.indb 5 2/5/20 2:59 PM Chapter Four In Conversation In chapter 2 we summarized the relevant research on the dominance of Ameri- can inequality beliefs. In this chapter we take a different approach, allowing leading scholars, in conversation, to discuss this research and reflect on what it all means for American society. We sat down for interviews with David Brady, Heather Bullock, Peter Callero, Henry Giroux, Sharon Krause, Michael Lewis, Stephen McNamee, and Jamila Michener. Each of these scholars has conducted academic work with important implications for the questions posed in this book concerning inequality beliefs and social policy. The interviews were conducted separately with each of the scholars and have been brought together for this chapter. What follows are highlights from our conversations, edited with input from the scholars themselves, and arranged thematically. Brief biographic sketches are available at the end of this chapter. AMERICAN PRECARITY As we discussed in chapter 1, the U.S. ranks poorly among wealthy countries on measures of overall poverty, childhood poverty, economic inequality, and social mobility, among others. The U.S. also stands out for the comparatively less generous and more individualistically oriented nature of its social poli- cies. We begin our discussion by focusing on the uniqueness of American precarity in the wealthy world. David Brady: The U.S. stands out as an exceptionally unequal country com- pared to other rich democracies. Across the board the U.S. is consistently one of the worst in terms of poverty, inequality, polarization of resources, 121 19_1205_Eppard.indb 121 2/5/20 2:59 PM 122 Chapter Four disadvantages, etc. The U.S. really sticks out on all of these measures as be- ing exceptionally and unusually and consistently unequal. Why does the U.S. have twice as much poverty as most Western European democracies? What you find, I argue, is that it is really the generosity of the social policies. We have decided to have these high levels of inequality and it is reflected in everything we do. The generosity of a country’s social policies really is the driving factor that explains why some rich democracies have low poverty and some have high poverty. Now, this is different from saying it’s the demography, that there are more single parents, or there are fewer people working. Those sorts of explanations don’t really explain the big differences. It is the generosity of social policies that really matters. Henry Giroux: Economic inequality is getting worse; it is at levels that are ob- scene. Four hundred families own most of the wealth in the country. We see a massive shift of wealth away from the general population to the upper one-tenth of one percent. Twenty percent of all kids in the United States live in poverty. The welfare state is under enormous attack due to neoliberal ideology politics. People at the top are consolidating power in ways that we haven’t seen since the first Gilded Age. The repercussions are horrendous in terms of public goods being defunded, everything from public transport to public schools. One could say the United States has reached its limit point in terms of whether or not it wants to call itself a democracy. I think what is different between the United States and Europe, with some exceptions, is that the United States is totally unapologetic at this point about its inequality, its accelerating culture of cruelty, and its politics of disposability and racial purifying. Rather than some- thing a government should be ashamed about, racism has become a signature feature of the current administration. Extremist ideologies have migrated from the margins to the center of power. This represents more than a crisis of values, ethics, and compassion. It is a dark political moment that is totally unapolo- getic about the divorce of economic activity from ethical considerations, which amounts to a politics emptied of any sense of moral and social responsibility. Jamila Michener: We should be thinking about why the United States is do- ing as terribly as it is on any number of metrics. We can think about poverty more generally, we can think about child poverty, we can think about out- comes like infant mortality. Across a range of measures, the theme is that the United States is not performing well, especially not relative to countries that are anywhere in the same realm as us economically. For a country that is as tremendously wealthy as we are, the number of people who are living in poverty or some degree of economic precarity 19_1205_Eppard.indb 122 2/5/20 2:59 PM In Conversation 123 is pretty astounding. The distribution of poverty across the populace is also troubling. We’re much more likely to see Black, Latino, and Native Americans living in poverty, more likely to see women living in poverty, and more likely to see children living in poverty. There are identifiable subsets of the population that are more heavily affected by the patterns of poverty that we see in the U.S., and that’s not as much the case among our international peers. The United States is especially bad at providing people who are not wealthy with economic security. We are especially bad at making sure that people who are disadvantaged economically are not disproportionally coming from a handful of groups. We’re not doing well. The important questions are about why and how to change that. David Brady: We used to believe that the U.S. was the land of opportunity. Sure, we had high inequality, but that’s okay because there was also lots of mobility. Working-class people could be rich, and rich people could fall into poverty. Whereas in some other countries there was less inequality but also less mobility. We know now that was wrong, that is certainly false. The U.S. is certainly not a high-mobility country. Henry Giroux: People used to talk about getting ahead and social mobility. Now many people aren’t talking about getting ahead anymore, they’re talk- ing about surviving. This is the great distinctive feature of the neoliberal age. Wages have gone down over the last thirty years, they are lower than they were in the 1970s. There are fewer jobs for young people. There’s more in- equality. The tentacles of the punishing state hover over students, depriving them of any safe spaces. You have massive social atomization because you don’t have public spheres that bring people together anymore. They are all being defunded or basically eliminated. David Brady: It is easy to see why economic elites might want to live in a place like the U.S. If you are rich, it is hard to beat living in the U.S. because it is easier to live an opulent life. It is easier to buy a house, and you can live a very private existence. The transportation infrastructure is in place, taxes are lower, there is less regulation, there are lots of private goods that you can consume, etc. So it is easy for me to understand why rich people want to keep the American system the way that it is. For poor people, it is hard to argue that living in the U.S. is better for them. You live a very fragile, precarious existence. There are so many ways in which the poor are more economically insecure here. In other rich democra- cies, people may not be rich—I don’t mean to imply that the poor in Sweden 19_1205_Eppard.indb 123 2/5/20 2:59 PM 124 Chapter Four are living a life of opulence—but they are secure. They are taken care of. They know that they need not worry about these fundamental things. Especially before health care reform was passed in the U.S. with the ACA, it was a real thing that people could become bankrupt because of a medical bill. That was a real thing. And that is unimaginable in Western Europe. Just unimaginable, absolutely never going to happen there. And that is a good example of the insecurity, the fragility, the precarity that working people suffer from here. Something like a health crisis could throw your family into economic crisis in the U.S., which is much less likely to occur in Europe. Now, plenty of working-class Americans are able to make their house pay- ments and have some modicum of economic comfort, but the risk factors are so much higher here. There is so much more uncertainty. You have a certain social insurance that exists with the generous social policies of Europe. There are also ways in which the working class and the poor are just socially ex- cluded from mainstream American society, from participating in mainstream middle-class institutions, whereas in Europe they are much more integrated. It is not perfect; Europe is certainly not a utopia for the working class.
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